Annals of a Former World: Assembling California II Andrew Bartlett In the article “Annals of a Former World: Assembling California II” by John McPhee you come across his love and interest of geology. With help from Eldridge Moore’s who is a tectonicist McPhee makes many visits to Donner Pass Nevada, to San Francisco and many other stops along the way. The construction of the highway going through this area has lead to major sections of mountains and hills being blasted away showing layers of natural occurring land drift and fossils. This construction has opened up so much information for tectonics research because they would have never had enough funds to ever look at this huge area and uncover what has taken place over thousands of years. So, when the hard work of moving the ground out of the way was done for researchers many new ideas and findings have taken place because they have found so many different answers than what they used to on how old the earth is and how it has become formed into what it is today. What interested McPhee into this field work was the new idea that was just starting to catch on in geology, which was tectonics. This is the idea that the earths core is always in constant movement and that it is pushing up agents each other creating pressure. This new idea was an explanation for why earthquakes happen and why it seems the earth crust (continents) have moved away from each other. When McPhee was doing his study on this field he was able to go out and learn from the first hand experiences he got working with people like Moore. He was able to be on site with the researchers as they would find there new finding and explanations for the questions that were still up in the air about the construction of the earth and how it works. With this article you have McPhee trying to state all of the information that he has learned on his trips to the cut away mountain areas. This makes the article very heavy on the content and the information that is given to you. McPhee writes down the research the way that it has been explained to him from other geologists. This makes it difficult to understand all the time what he is speaking about if you are not a geologist and used to the research terms. Although this makes the article more difficult it seems to be vital to McPhee’s story because he is not afraid to make you learn from his works. He does not try to dump down his work so that everyone can read it and understand it like most journalists do with their works. McPhee just states to you what he has learned because it seems that he wants you to get more out of what he has written after you have finished than when you started. In many of McPhee’s articles he wants to teach you the actual events and information that is used in the fields he is writing about. This allows the reader to have to look at the piece harder and work out its meaning instead of it being given to you. McPhee also, likes to have his readers thinking about his articles after they are finished and want to know what he was talking about. So, he sets some of them up so that people have to do their own research to find out what he meant in his articles. This idea is hardly used by others because people usually just want the facts and that’s it. But, with McPhee he writes so that you learn something and the more you learn the better off as person you will become.
Type in the content of your page here.
Andrew Bartlett
In the article “Annals of a Former World: Assembling California II” by John McPhee you come across his love and interest of geology. With help from Eldridge Moore’s who is a tectonicist McPhee makes many visits to Donner Pass Nevada, to San Francisco and many other stops along the way. The construction of the highway going through this area has lead to major sections of mountains and hills being blasted away showing layers of natural occurring land drift and fossils. This construction has opened up so much information for tectonics research because they would have never had enough funds to ever look at this huge area and uncover what has taken place over thousands of years. So, when the hard work of moving the ground out of the way was done for researchers many new ideas and findings have taken place because they have found so many different answers than what they used to on how old the earth is and how it has become formed into what it is today.
What interested McPhee into this field work was the new idea that was just starting to catch on in geology, which was tectonics. This is the idea that the earths core is always in constant movement and that it is pushing up agents each other creating pressure. This new idea was an explanation for why earthquakes happen and why it seems the earth crust (continents) have moved away from each other. When McPhee was doing his study on this field he was able to go out and learn from the first hand experiences he got working with people like Moore. He was able to be on site with the researchers as they would find there new finding and explanations for the questions that were still up in the air about the construction of the earth and how it works.
With this article you have McPhee trying to state all of the information that he has learned on his trips to the cut away mountain areas. This makes the article very heavy on the content and the information that is given to you. McPhee writes down the research the way that it has been explained to him from other geologists. This makes it difficult to understand all the time what he is speaking about if you are not a geologist and used to the research terms. Although this makes the article more difficult it seems to be vital to McPhee’s story because he is not afraid to make you learn from his works. He does not try to dump down his work so that everyone can read it and understand it like most journalists do with their works. McPhee just states to you what he has learned because it seems that he wants you to get more out of what he has written after you have finished than when you started. In many of McPhee’s articles he wants to teach you the actual events and information that is used in the fields he is writing about. This allows the reader to have to look at the piece harder and work out its meaning instead of it being given to you. McPhee also, likes to have his readers thinking about his articles after they are finished and want to know what he was talking about. So, he sets some of them up so that people have to do their own research to find out what he meant in his articles. This idea is hardly used by others because people usually just want the facts and that’s it. But, with McPhee he writes so that you learn something and the more you learn the better off as person you will become.
Type in the content of your page here.